SPARROWBUSH — Ed Kackos is a modest guy. Soft-spoken. A Vietnam-era vet. Disabled after a fruitful lifetime working as an electrician.

It took a lot of bureaucratic abuse for him to raise the mildest of complaints. Another man might call his success some sort of vengeance or vindication.

To Ed Kackos, it's justice. And he only wishes he could spread some of that justice among the hundreds of thousands of veterans who face similar forms of abuse.

Kackos filed for 100 percent disability relief at the Department of Veterans Affairs in February 2011. He had been on 60 percent disability through Social Security for three years. But when he learned he qualified for full disability through the VA, he applied for it.

Over the course of the next two years, he was ordered to take two physicals.

"And that was it. Just two physicals. They never said why," Kackos said last week.

Every now and then, the VA would let him know his case was "still open."

In the meantime, his wife was seriously ill with lung cancer. The couple went into debt, using credit cards to pay their bills. It looked like they'd have to sell their house.

Kackos finally took a step he never expected to — he brought his situation to the attention of his representative in Congress, Republican Rep. Nan Hayworth.

When she lost her re-election bid last year, she passed Kackos' case along to her Democratic successor, Sean Patrick Maloney. And Maloney made Kackos the poster boy for legislation he was sponsoring, the Disabled Veterans Red Tape Reduction Act.

As its title says, the legislation is aimed at addressing the backlog of roughly 600,000 disability claims that Kackos found himself an unhappy and increasingly desperate part of.

Last week, the red tape that had been strangling Ed Kackos's life finally came loose. He was notified that he qualified for full disability. He expects to receive retroactive disability payments that will allow him to keep his home off the market.

If justice finally arrived for Ed Kackos, it didn't arrive in time for him to enjoy it with the woman who shared his life's battles.